NATURE OF LIFE INSURANCE 5

There is nothing more uncertain than life and nothing more certain than life insurance.

The risk of death differs in important particulars from all other perils to which we are exposed or which are made the subject of insurance. The chief difference is that while other risks are hazards only, death is ultimately a certainty. At all times, therefore, it is a hazard, converging into a certainty. This does not mean that it is necessarily an increasing hazard at all ages, though it is at most ages; in the first year after birth, for instance, the mortality is heavier than in the second, and indeed the risk of death during the year diminishes each year throughout the period of early in-fancy. But whether taken from birth or from a later period when the liability to die becomes a rapidly increasing function, death is certain in the end. It follows, therefore, that insurance against death at whatever time it may take place, involves not merely providing against the hazard of death each year, but also provision to meet at the ultimate limit of human life an absolutely certain claim if one has up to that time been escaped.

Insurance differs from gambling also in yet another particular. The company appears not merely in the role of putting at stake the amount of its policy, but also as stakeholder, i. e, as holder of the stakes put up by the in-